There is an increasing demand for businessmen, professionals and ordinary consumers to have greater access to communications on the move. Paging systems have become very popular for communications, enabling a user to carry a lightweight, low cost device that has good wide-area and in-building penetration. In the past, paging systems have suffered from the disadvantage of being one-way only, but recently Motorola, Inc. has introduced the "Reflex" asymmetric two-way paging system which enables a user to respond to incoming messages. Asymmetric systems are particularly beneficial for sending out to the pager volumes of data that exceed the volumes expected to be sent back. They are particularly suited to the sending back of short acknowledgments or tags identifying "canned" responses (such as "OK" or "I'm unable to reply right now").
Simultaneously with the development of asymmetric two-way paging systems, symmetric two-way data systems such as the `ARDIS` (trademark) system have developed, enabling significant volumes of data to be sent in both directions over a nationwide public data system.
It is known to provide remote electronic mail (e-mail) connection between a private e-mail server and a portable computer using a two-way radio modem such as a "Personal Messenger 100D" (trademark) modem manufactured by Motorola, Inc. Such an arrangement is shown in FIG. 1. The modem 106 is plugged into a PCMCIA slot of a portable computer 105 and a two-way connection to the private e-mail server is established (almost like establishment of a two-way telephone modem link) between a portable computer and its host server. The connection is via a base station 120 and a public network server 110 of the public two-way radio network 130. In such an arrangement, the computer behaves just as if it were connected by a wireless local area network (LAN) to the server, except that the connection is slow (low band width and high latency). A screen will appear on the portable computer 105 showing the entire contents of an "in" box maintained at the host server 115, with message types, sender names, times of receipt and the like. By selecting a particular message (using a mouse or otherwise), a command is sent to the server causing the entire message to be downloaded to the portable computer.
Such two-way radio messaging systems tend to be expensive, partly because of the cost of providing a significant bandwidth radio channel which is largely dedicated (at a given time) to the user. Another contribution to the high cost is the separate modem and portable computer.
There is a need for a convenient and inexpensive way to access a private e-mail server over a radio system.